1955: Frank Kameny is fired from his job as an astronomer in the United States Army’s Map Service in Washington, D.C. because of his homosexuality. A few days later he is blacklisted from seeking federal employment. These events spur Kameny into being a gay rights activist

1983: Mel Brook’s To Be or Not To Be, a remake of the Ernst Lubitsch classic becomes the first mainstream Hollywood film to not only acknowledge Nazi persecution of homosexuals, but also makes it a key plot element

1928: Having been published in Paris the previous July, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, the first major novel in English with an explicitly pro lesbian theme, is published in the U.S. Americans buy more than 20,000 copies of the book within the next month, making it a bestseller